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What if Henry Ford was an fpga designer? - 0 views

  • Over 100 years ago, when Henry Ford was conceiving a mass produced automobile, it was in an environment where cars were specified and built to order one by one. Each car was 'hand crafted' with the care and precision warranted by a fledgling auto market where society's elite were the only ones who could afford such a revolutionary contraption.
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    Interesting view!
Aasemoon =)

WebP Home - 0 views

  • WebP is a method of lossy compression that can be used on photographic images. WebP offers compression that has shown 39.8% more byte-size efficiency than JPEG for the same quality in a large scale study of 900,000 images on the Web. The degree of compression is adjustable so a user can choose the trade-off between file size and image quality.
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    Well this is interesting!
Aasemoon =)

Making a 3D Model From a Photosynth | Larry Larsen | Channel 10 - 0 views

  • There's an interesting video on YouTube from Binary Millenium showing how to make a 3D model out of real objects using Microsoft's Photosynth. It's an interesting idea that while unofficial, may be a big time saver and a lot of fun for many of you. This will work best if you use a Photosynth that not only has a high rate of 'synthiness' but also tons of points in the point cloud. A point in the point cloud means that a specific feature in two more photos has been identified allowing for Photosynth to some degree determine where in space that point exists. While a good Photosynth might have 100% synthiness, meaning all the pictures were connected, it doesn't necissarily mean there will be lots of points in the point cloud.
Aasemoon =)

IEEE Spectrum: Breakthrough in Creating a Band Gap for Graphene Promises Huge Potential... - 0 views

  • Ever since graphene was first produced in a lab at the University of Manchester in 2004, researchers around the world have been fascinated with its potential in electronics applications. Graphene possessed all the benefits of carbon nanotubes (CNTs), namely its charged-carrier mobility, but it didn’t have any of the down sides, such as CNTs’ need for different processing techniques than silicon and the intrinsic difficulty of creating interconnects for CNTs. But all was not easy for applying graphene to electronics applications. One of the fundamental problems for graphene was its lack of a band gap, which left it with a very low on-off ratio measured at about 10 as compared to in the 100s for silicon. Now this fundamental hurdle has been overcome. Based on research led by Phaedon Avouris at IBM’s IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, IBM is reporting that they have created a significant band gap in graphene.
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    VERY interesting...
Aasemoon =)

Making a 3D Model From a Photosynth | LarryLarsen | Channel 9 - 0 views

  • There's an interesting video on YouTube from Binary Millenium showing how to make a 3D model out of real objects using Microsoft's Photosynth. It's an interesting idea that, while unofficial, may be a big time saver and a lot of fun for many of you. This will work best if you use a Photosynth that not only has a high rate of 'synthiness' but also lots of points in the point cloud. A point in the point cloud means that a specific feature has been identified in two or more photos, allowing for Photosynth to determine to some degree where in space that point exists. While a good Photosynth might have 100% synthiness, meaning all the pictures are connected, it doesn't necessarily mean there will be lots of points in the point cloud.
Aasemoon =)

Simulation Robot Programming with Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (MRDS) and SPL - ... - 0 views

  • Simulation enables people with a personal computer to develop very interesting robots, cars, spaceship, and an enormous range of scientific effects with the main limiting factors becoming time and imagination. A novice user with little to no coding experience can use simulation; developing interesting applications in a game-like environment.
Aasemoon =)

Gostai - robotics for everyone - 0 views

  • We are entering the robotic age. All over the world, we see research projects and companies working on realistic, market driven robots, with impressive realizations ranging from intelligent vacuum cleaners to humanoid robots.   This is a very exciting time and some people see in the current situation many common points with the early days of the computer industry. However, like PCs in the early 80's, today's robots are still incompatible in term of software. There is yet no standard way to reuse one component from one robot to the other, which is needed to have a real software industry bootstraping. And most attempts have been failing to provide tools genuinely adapted to the complex need of robot programming.   Here at Gostai, we believe that the industry needs a powerful robotics software platform, ready to face the challenges of Artificial Intelligence and autonomous robots programming.
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    This can be interesting...
Aasemoon =)

IEEE Spectrum: Interesting FBI Definition of "Minor" Technical Issues in Sentinel Project - 0 views

  • As I noted last week, US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Robert Mueller told the US House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies that the follow-on to the notoriously failed $170 million Virtual Case File program called Sentinel would once again slip its schedule and cost targets. The latest cost estimate is in excess of $481 million with a total program slip now of some two years and counting.    Director Mueller told the House Committee that the FBI decided to suspend work on Sentinel in early March to correct some "minor" technical issues and make some design changes. These issues included, according to the New York Times, "slow response times, awkward display pages and screen print that was too small."
Aasemoon =)

Module aids Camera Link FPGA image processing | Industrial Control Designline - 0 views

  • National Instruments has released a vision module for the PXI platform that provides a high-performance parallel processing architecture for hardware-defined timing, control and image pre-processing. The NI 1483 Camera Link adapter module, in combination with an NI FlexRIO field-programmable gate array (FPGA) board, offers a solution for embedding vision and control algorithms directly on FPGAs which are used to process and analyse an image in real time with little to no CPU intervention. The FPGAs can be used to perform operations by pixel, line and region of interest. They can implement many image processing algorithms that are inherently parallel, including fast Fourier transforms (FFTs), thresholding and filtering.
Aasemoon =)

Brain-controlled prosthetic limb most advanced yet - 0 views

  • Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) were awarded no less than $34.5 million by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to continue their outstanding work in the field of prosthetic limb testing, which has seen them come up with the most advanced model yet. Their Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) system is just about ready to be tested on human subjects, as it has proved successful with monkeys. Basically, the prosthetic arm is controlled by the brain through micro-arrays that are implanted (gently) in the head. They record brain signals and send the commands to the computer software that controls the arm. To be honest, it will be interesting to see just how these hair-chips are attached to the brain, but the APL say clinical tests have shown the devices to be entirely harmless. The monkeys didn’t mind them too much, at least.
Aasemoon =)

Cleve's Corner - "Magic" Reconstruction: Compressed Sensing - MathWorks Newsletter - 1 views

  • When I first heard about compressed sensing, I was skeptical. There were claims that it reduced the amount of data required to represent signals and images by huge factors and then restored the originals exactly. I knew from the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem that this is impossible. But after learning more about compressed sensing, I’ve come to realize that, under the right conditions, both the claims and the theorem are true. The Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem states that to restore a signal exactly and uniquely, you need to have sampled with at least twice its frequency. Of course, this theorem is still valid; if you skip one byte in a signal or image of white noise, you can’t restore the original. But most interesting signals and images are not white noise. When represented in terms of appropriate basis functions, such as trig functions or wavelets, many signals have relatively few non-zero coefficients. In compressed (or compressive) sensing terminology, they are sparse.
Aasemoon =)

Should Robots Feel - 0 views

  • The purpose of this essay is to examine whether or not there would be practical reasons for creating a conscious, emotional machine.  I will not delve to deeply into whether or not it is possible to create such a machine, as the argument as to what exactly would constitute a living conscious machine seems largely unsettled.  Rather I will concentrate on whether or not we should create such a machine, if the possibility becomes available to us.  Are there uses for such a machine that could not be satisfied by a complex automaton?  Is there anything about real emotional response that would be necessary for a machine to operate autonomously, and still interact with human beings?  What are the dangers? What are the ethical ramifications? It is questions such as these that will be the interest of this paper.
Aasemoon =)

A closer look at ZMP's RoboCar - 0 views

  • Kota Nezu of ZNUG Design talks about his work developing the look of ZMP’s RoboCar, an educational platform for researchers working on autonomous vehicles.  The video is entirely Japanese, but you can see some cool CAD work and there’s some explanatory slides in this .PDF file.  Nezu-san also designed ZMP’s e-nuvo Humanoid, and Toyota’s personal transporter, the i-unit (seen in model form on his desk).  Part 2 follows after the break for those interested.
Aasemoon =)

The Blue Talkz...: Winduino II - 4 views

  • This is really kool. I mean REALLY REALLY. Based on the ancient Aeolian harp, and made out of Adruino BT Bluetooth board, this little instrument plays with wind. Oh, and it’s solar powered. More info can be found here.  
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    Very interesting idea, but I'm not really impressed by the music it generates.
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    Thanks for the tip, Aasemoon - I liked it so much - http://www.jackdlogan.com/music/winduino_II.html - surely, the Aeolian harp must have been the way humans first learned about pitched sound; in its original form - "Aeolian harps in literature and music Aeolian harps are featured in at least two Romantic-era poems, "The Aeolian Harp" and "Dejection, an Ode", both by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In William Heinesen's novel The Lost Musicians set in Tórshavn, Kornelius Isaksen takes his three sons to a little church where, in the tower, they sit listening to the 'capriciously varying sounds of an Aeolian harp', which leads the boys into a lifelong passion for music. Aeolian harps are mentioned in Vladimir Nabokov's classic Lolita. A lyre is mentioned in Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" which is another name for an Aeolian Harp. An aeolian harp is featured in Ian Fleming's 1964 children's novel Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to make a cave seem haunted. Henry Cowell's Aeolian Harp (1923) was one of the first piano pieces ever to feature extended techniques on the piano which included plucking and sweeping the pianist's hands directly across the strings of the piano. The Etude in A flat major for piano (1836) by Frédéric Chopin (Étude Op. 25, No. 1 (Chopin)) is sometimes called the "Aeolian Harp" etude, a nickname given it by Robert Schumann. The piece features a delicate, tender, and flowing melody in the fifth finger of the pianist's right hand, over a background of rapid pedaled arpeggios. One of Sergei Lyapunov's 12 études d'exécution transcendante, Op.11 No.9, is named by the author "Harpes éoliennes" (aeolian harps). In this virtuoso piece, written between 1897 and 1905, the tremolo accompaniment seems to imitate the sounding of the instrument. Young Thomas at work on his harp. In 1972, Chuck Hancock and Harry Bee recorded a giant 30 foot
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    Cool... glad you like this Jack! =) It amazed me quite a bit too...
Aasemoon =)

EETimes CleanTerra - 0 views

  • The IEEE has launched a new Web site that consolidates information about smart electric grids from it various societies. The portal is one of many activities from an IEEE smart grid initiative coordinating the organization's work on the transition to digital, networked power systems and services. The smart grid is "so interdisciplinary," said Wanda Reder, chair of the IEEE Smart Grid Task Force and former president of the IEEE Power & Energy Society. "We have the gamut covered in technical interests, but we needed a way to facilitate communications between our many entities to link information on all the conferences, papers and standards we have in this area," she added.
Aasemoon =)

Using an FPGA to tame the power beast in consumer handheld MPUs | Audio DesignLine - 1 views

  • The consumer handheld market is growing by leaps and bounds. With more processing power and increased support for more applications, portable products are cross-pollinating with traditional computing systems even as the product life cycle has decreased considerably in this market segment. As a result, especially in this era of economic slowdown, it is imperative that new products meet the time-to-market window to gain maximum acceptance. A decrease in product life cycles requires a reduced development cycle and an increased emphasis on reusability and reprogrammability. The emerging handheld market is also seeing interesting trends in which each individual device in a family has lower volumes but there is more customization across the series of devices, effectively upping the total unit volumes. The key challenge then becomes how to develop a system that is widely reusable and also customizable. These requirements have led designers increasingly to turn to the FPGA for handheld-product development. The FPGA has become more powerful and feature-rich, while gate counts, area and frequency have increased. FPGA development and turnaround cycles are considerably shorter than those of custom ASICs, and the added advantage of reprogrammability can make the FPGA a more compelling solution for handheld embedded systems.
Aasemoon =)

New 6 Issue Fringe Comic Series: Tales From The Fringe - 0 views

  • If the Fringe Graphic Novel isn’t enough to satisfy your appetite for the Fringe extended universe, you might be interested in a new six-issue comic miniseries from Wildstorm Comics, titled Tales From The Fringe. The series is said to take place within the Fringe universe, meaning it will explore stories that we might not necessarily see on the show itself, but will add extra context to the Fringe mythology. As with the original comic series, it looks like each issue will contain a main story focusing on our main characters, and a looser second story. The first issue lands June 23rd, 2010, for $3.99. Head past the jump to read the official description from Wildstorm Comics.
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    Woooohooooowww! =D
Aasemoon =)

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: The Puzzle of 21 Lutetia - 0 views

  • On 10 July, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft will fly within a few thousand kilometres of 21 Lutetia, a main belt asteroid that orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Lutetia is an unusual object. It is classified as an M-type asteroid, which are thought to be made mainly of nickel and iron. However, Lutetia's spectrum does not seem to show any evidence of metals. In fact, exactly what Lutetia is made of puzzles astronomers. That's partly why it was chosen for the fly by. So come July, astronomers should know the answer to this conundrum. But in the run up, they're indulging in a little fun. The game they've invented is to see how good a prediction they can make about what Rosetta will find. Today, Irina Belskaya at the Observatoire de Paris and a few friends take a stab. They make several detailed predictions about Lutetia based partly on observations dating back to the 1960s but mostly on data taken since 2004, when interest picked up after the asteroid was chosen as a flyby target. So what do they think Rosetta will find?
Aasemoon =)

・NAMO - 1 views

  • NAMO (Novel Articulated MObile platform)  is a humanoid robot built by The Institute of Field Robotics (FIBO) at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi in Thailand. FIBO is active in the RoboCup scene and have developed a wide range of robot types, including an experimental biped.  NAMO was unveiled on March 29th 2010, serving as FIBO’s mascot as part of the university’s 50 year anniversary celebrations.  NAMO will be used to welcome people to the university and may be deployed at museums.  Given its friendly appearance and functionality, it could be used to research human robot interaction and communication. NAMO is 130cm (4′3″) tall and has 16 degrees of freedom.  It moves on a stable three-wheeled omnidirectional base, and is equipped with a Blackfin camera for its vision system.  It is capable of simple gesture recognition, visually tracks humans or objects of interest automatically, and can speak a few phrases in a child-like voice (in Thai).
Aasemoon =)

SurfaceCube: Design Thinking for Natural User Interfaces | Inside Out | Channel 9 - 0 views

  • Microsoft Surface is a prime example of how natural user interfaces can change the way we interact with computers. As designers and developers, one challenge with creating natural user interfaces for multi-touch devices such as Microsoft Surface or Windows 7 is getting around the old ways of thinking and old habits for interface design. Joshua Blake from InfoStrat decided to tackle this problem by creating SurfaceCube. SurfaceCube is a simple 3-D puzzle game for Microsoft Surface which he designed to illustrate as many as the Surface Interaction Guidelines as possible. I had the opportunity to sit down with Joshua and discuss SurfaceCube and the thinking behind some really interesting design decisions that makes it stand out as a natural user interface. We also briefly discuss Joshua’s upcoming book about natural user interfaces and multi-touch development, Multitouch on Windows: NUI Development with WPF and Silverlight, due Fall 2010 (since recording this interview, the book titled was updated). As a special offer to Channel 9 readers, you can use the following coupon to order the book through the Manning Early Access Program and read the chapters as Josh writes them. Coupon code channel9y is good for 35% off Multitouch on Windows: NUI Development with WPF and Silverlight when ordered through manning.com, and expires on April 24, 2010.
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